Carpe Fulgur On Tackling The Future

In the last segment of our interview with him, conducted just days before his company’s debut localization project, Recettear, co-founder of Carpe Fulgur, Andrew Dice, touched upon what the company’s plans were now their first project was ready to go out the door.

“Ideally, we would like to turn Carpe Fulgur into a going interest, yes,” we were told. “While at the very least Recettear will give pretty much everyone involved much stronger resumes if we go job-hunting in the ‘established’ industry, there’s a lot to be said for being master of your own destiny and getting to choose what you work on and when. ”

Luckily for fans, Carpe Fulgur already have more localization projects already lined up, following the completion of Recettear, along with a few additional pitches that they’re hoping will make it into the pipeline as well.

“We do have a few other titles lined up as being pretty sure bets for localization, assuming that Recettear makes us enough money to actually live on, and current estimates place this somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 12,000 sales in roughly six months,” Dice revealed to us.

He continued: “Not impossible, but no mean feat for a new indie localization house, either, and there’s a few other titles we’re investigating for a possible pitch to the developers for localization once Recettear’s out the door and we prove we have the chops for localization.”

But in addition to an indie publisher of games, Dice would also like to grow Carpe Fulgur into a localization unit for contract work.

“There’s a fair number of these out there, like Alexander O. Smith’s Kajiya Productions, and a lot of publishers tend to rely on groups like that instead of maintaining a constant localization staff,” he explained.

The long-term goal is to move beyond just the indie games scene and to add more high-profile games to Carpe Fulgur’s portfolio of projects, which Dice is very keen on.

He concluded: “The plan for now is, assuming we earn enough to at least justify continuing, to bring over a few more titles we have an essential lock on, and then try to branch out from there. As I said earlier in the interview — I’ve wanted to do this since grade school, and I have no intention of exiting the industry without at least making a proper run of it.”

I think it’s great what Carpe Fulgur have done. It’s opened the door for these types of titles in an environment for easy distribution on Steam. Where before developers might have felt it too risky to expand into other territories with a retail release this allows for less risk with digital copies. I hope we see more of these titles on the way.

Tom_Phoenix

Nevertheless, I would still like to eventually see a retail release from Carpe Fulgur or even possibiy a retail rerelease of this title (just like how Audiosurf was released for retail).If nothing else, they could offer the same deal Introversion software does (another indie developer, just to make it clear) and personally sell boxed copies for a slightly larger price..People who love digital distribution might consider that stupid, but gamers love to have options.

Kamion

Yes, I would pay 25-30 bucks for a boxed copy of Recettear with a booklet but meh.

http://innerchildgamer.com Doc@ICG

Same here, wish them the best of luck. Been trying to get into localization (or production) myself, but it is really difficult to get anyone to take a chance on you (without personal connections, anyway). Plus, indie groups often provide stellar translations cuz they don’t have to work under publisher timelines. Hoping this is an everybody wins situation :P